Review of "Nothing to Hide"

Nothing to Hide: Mental Illness
in the Family is a collection of interviews and photographs of families in
which one or more have experienced mental illness, and the aim of the book is
to be open about these experiences to show that there is nothing shameful about
them. There is a foreword by Kay Redfield
Jamison, a ringing endorsement on the front cover by Andrew Solomon, author of
the award-winning The Noonday Demon, and more strong endorsements on the
back from Lesley Stahl, co-editor of 60 Minutes and Jay Neugeboren,
author of the wonderful memoir Imaging Robert. The book is large-format and nearly 300 pages, and it tells the
stories of 44 families. The families
vary in size from one person to large groups.
All are American, but they are from a wide range of ethnic groups and
they range from the very young to the old.
Some of the interviewees are very eloquent in describing how they have
coped with the illness in their families, and they are all very supportive and
loving, without minimizing the difficulty of the challenges they have faced.

Since there is still a great deal
of stigma attached to mental illness, any attempt to fight the stigma is worth
encouraging. So I feel rather guilty in
my unenthusiastic reaction to this book.
The aims of the authors are entirely admirable and their hard work in
collecting the interviews deserves praise.
The black and white photographs are of high quality and show their
subjects in a good light. Reading a few
families stories is interesting and even moving. However, reading more than a few becomes hard work because all
the stories start to blur together.
After reading many, I started to feel that the concept would work better
as a radio or TV show or a documentary, or even as a performance by
actors. Then you would hear or see the
people speaking their words, and you would get a much better understanding of
the emotions behind their words. The
bare words on the page with no other information about the person who spoke
them are emotionally flat.

As I read through the book I
started to question who exactly would want to read it and what good it might
do. In the introduction, Kenneth
Duckwood wonders how the book might have changed his life if it has been
available when he was a child and his father developed manic-depressive
illness. Duckwood went on to become a
psychiatrist. I wondered what difference
the book might have made in my family, in which there has been a good deal of
diagnosed mental illness and undiagnosed eccentric and self-destructive
behavior. It is hard for me to imagine
that such a book would have made an iota of difference to our dysfunctional
relationships, and in that respect, I don't think our family was very different
from most others. For one thing, I
don't imagine that anyone in our family would have been ever tempted to buy the
book in the first place, and if they had, everyone else would have wondered why
they had done so. Our family, like many
if not most, almost never discussed mental illness, and a book of interviews
and photographs would have not had the power to change that.

Maybe times have changed since the 1960s
and 1970s, and with the lessening stigma of mental illness, it is possible that
such interventions have more chance of changing people's attitudes. It's also likely that there are wide
cultural differences between different groups.
I grew up in the UK, and until I moved to the US in my mid-twenties I
never met anyone who was open about being in psychotherapy, let alone taking
psychotropic medication apart from tranquilizers or sleeping pills. It may be that in many parts of American
culture, with long traditions of being open about one's personal problems,
there is more possibility of being open about mental illness. It's also possible that some readers will
find inspiration in these relatively short interviews, because obviously
different readers are able to find very different sorts of tests personally
useful. When I watch TV shows such as Oprah
and Dr. Phil featuring ordinary people talking about their personal
problems, I generally find the show's treatment of the subject superficial and
manipulative, but the viewing figures for these shows suggest that millions of
people must find the stories uplifting.
While Nothing to Hide contains only short interviews and so only
scratches the surface of people's lives, it is not at all manipulative, and it
is entirely possible that many readers will find its stories inspiring as
well.

Some of the interviews are longer
and go into more depth. Paul Gottlieb,
who has had a very successful career in the publishing industry, talks for
seven pages about his experience of depression and its role in his life. In the Johnson family, Pearl describes how
she has been in and out of prison for fifty-one years, and how she has lived
with mental illness all of her life.
Her daughters also describe their experience of mental illness,
prostitution and jail. In the Frese
family, Fred Frese explains how he was diagnosed with schizophrenia at the age
of 25 and recovered well enough to become Director of Psychology at Western
Reserve Psychiatric Hospital in Ohio.
His wife Penny talks about her husband's illness and her four children's
encounters with depression. Even these
longer interviews however are very brief compared to a memoir, and really it is
only in a book length approach that is going to reveal any of the complexity
and richness of a person's life and the challenge of facing mental
illness. So ultimately I would
recommend that even those who do find Nothing to Hide rewarding, it is
worth the effort to read memoirs and even some novels if one wants to get a
real sense of what is it like for individuals and families to live with serious
psychiatric disorders.

Christian Perring, Ph.D., is Chair of the Philosophy Department
at Dowling College, Long Island, and editor of Metapsychology
Online Review. His main research is on philosophical issues in
medicine, psychiatry and psychology.